eFinance: Building The Next Layer Of Egypt’s Financial System – Ahmed Sobhy

It's very simple and yet complex.

I think we operate Egypt's national digital infrastructure, particularly the financial side.

We're not a bank, we're not a payments app, we're the layer that kind of sits underneath both.

Mm-hmm.

And I think since 2005, we've built and run, uh, the systems through which the Egyptian state collects and disperses money, so in terms of tax, customs, subsidies, uh, public payroll, um, and, and that's subsidies in the agriculture space and, uh, in the petroleum industry, in health.

In the first half of this year alone, we've done roughly one point three trillion of value moved across o-our rails.

And then around that course it's a comp- a bunch of specialized companies, so one that works on cloud infrastructure, so helps deliver that infrastructure for the state, so helps, you know, build a cloud around it and, and have the pieces around cybersecurity and a lot of the managed services that can help you deliver those services to the public.

And then working on things like e-invoicing, payments, mostly B2B, and even we have a relatively, uh, sizable business process outsourcing company, which also actually serves a lot of our current clients and has been growing internationally over the last 18 months or so.

And then I think today we're sort of an inflection point where we're starting to layer two things on top of this.

I think one is monetizing the data that's been built over the last 20 years.

So starting to monetize that data, help the government monetize that data, particularly in driving financial inclusion use cases.

And to be able to do that, we're starting to layer financial services on top of that same infrastructure.

So those are the two things that are kind of happening today is embedded finance and data monetization are sort of the next iteration of e-finance.

We'll come back to some of that, um, in a, in a few moments.

But what, in your view, makes the group distinctive within the Egyptian market?

I think, one, we are an infrastructure player rather than an application, uh, layer player, and I think that's very different-

Mm-hmm

... from the other companies that you might see in the space.

And I, and I think that infrastructure layer only works when you can deliver this over a long period of time.

So you're trusted, you have really strong operating skills, and I, and, and I think that's a very important part of what we've done over the long period, and that we can work with many players in the ecosystem.

We're very much collaborative.

We want to be the tissue that connects many, many people, that allows people to transact much more seamlessly and really drives financial inclusion in the country.

That's where we're different.

The second part of it is the point around data.

I think the data that we currently-- that goes through our, uh, systems is massive.